Don’t know how to answer this objection

[Augustine8]

An objection to the faith was posed and I can’t find counter-arguments.
The objection goes something like this: “The 10 commandments and the laws of the faith were just made up by the poor to gain influence.” The counter to this IMO would be that you’d have to be able to dis-prove Christ’s Divinity to say that His teachings were made up… and they got him killed which is not much influence. Or you’d have to disprove Christ’s existence, which some of the Atheists try to do. Not sure how I’d respond the 10 commandments one. I can’t find any articles or topics on this subject, and I wasn’t curious to know your guy’s opinions.
Thanks

 

[Cjbhoward]

The 10 commandments & the law were perfected by Christ. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your mind, & all your strenght. & love your neighbor as yourself.

I don’t see how that gains influence.

That doesn’t make a poor man rich.

 

[Dan_Defender]

On the contrary, Christians were persecuted and killed for 300 years after Christ. So it is the opposite of gaining influence.

 

[ELCore]

“The 10 commandments and the laws of the faith were just made up by the poor to gain influence.”

That’s it? That’s all? Must be more to it than that.

I mean, what facts and reasoning are mustered to support that claim?

If it’s merely a claim, a bare assertion, the only proper response is a mere claim, a bare assertion, that it’s wrong.

Don’t set the bar too high for yourself.

 

[Pattylt]

This is a really confusing claim! First of all, the 10 commandments were given a thousand years before the Catholic faith…if that’s the faith they mean? What guarantee would any poor group have that anyone would later go along with these laws? How would these laws gain them power or wealth?

Either something is missing or someone was really reaching for a “gotcha”!

 

[porthos11]

An objection to the faith was posed and I can’t find counter-arguments.
The objection goes something like this: “The 10 commandments and the laws of the faith were just made up by the poor to gain influence.” The counter to this IMO would be that you’d have to be able to dis-prove Christ’s Divinity to say that His teachings were made up… and they got him killed which is not much influence. Or you’d have to disprove Christ’s existence, which some of the Atheists try to do. Not sure how I’d respond the 10 commandments one. I can’t find any articles or topics on this subject, and I wasn’t curious to know your guy’s opinions.
Thanks

The counter to this is a basic rule of debate: “prove it.”

 

[Thom18]

Just tell them to prove it. They made a claim, so the burden of proof is on them to provide evidence for it. The burden isn’t on you to try and disprove what hasn’t been properly established.

 

[therese1998]

I would say that how the 10 commandments affect the poor is neither here nor there, other than the fact that the Lord cares deeply about the plight of the poor, while acknowledging that they will always be with us.

The 10 commandments were “developed” by God and given to man as guidance for living a life of agape love. Agape love is not only the best way to love, and brings the highest chance of happiness, but is also the surest path to Heaven. That it helps the poor is not in question. It also helps the rich, as their valuables will not be stolen, neither will their goods nor their wife. Both the rich and the poor have equal access to salvation through living out the Commandments (as well as receiving the sacraments, etc).

 

[therese1998]

To add: just because someone says something doesn’t mean it’s true or that they have “won” the arguement.

This took me an embarrassingly LONG time to figure this out (and still gets me at times, if truth be told). It is a popular tactic in the “if you can’t disprove it, then what I say is true” line of reasoning that goes on with those who like to argue. For instance, someone could say that all women lie to men to gain influence within their own circle of women friends and relatives. You can even give me all the reasons you think it’s true, and eye witness examples of many women who do just this thing and give me examples of how you think it gives them “influence”. But that a. doesn’t make it true and b. is very difficult to disprove outside a level of knowledge that touches on the omniscient. It’s a classic trick to come up with something that is almost impossible to prove, attach some impressive sounding statistics to it, and then triumphantly conclude you have disproven Christianity (or the 10 commandments or God or whatever it is you are setting out to “disprove”). That’s not “winning”; that’s distraction and it works very well for a lot of in-your-face, can’t-convert-me-cause-I’m-so-special types

 

[Gorgias]

The objection goes something like this: “The 10 commandments and the laws of the faith were just made up by the poor to gain influence.”

LOL! One of my favorite pieces of graffiti humor goes something like this:

I don’t know if the person who proposed this ‘objection’ to you realizes it or not, but he’s merely parroting one of Nietzsche’s claims. (Of course, since Nietzsche was notorious for his anti-Semitism, he didn’t say that it was the “poor” who were trying to gain influence unfairly. I’m sure you can imagine who he called out. )

So… although Nietzsche isn’t alive, his ideas certainly are. The reasonable response, as others have already identified, is “ok… then prove it.” The proof would not lay in pointing to the relative poverty of Jews and Christians, but in what the assertion explicitly claims: that the motivation behind these doctrines was purely an attempt to raise themselves out of poverty.

(It’s a theory that, simply put, is unprovable. But, if they want to have a go at it, let them…)

 

[Lee1]

How poor were these poor, they had to afford a good chisel and hammer for that tablet.

 

[GospelOfMatthew]

Weren’t the tablets forged by God by lightning (twice)? Or is that dramatic interpretation from the movie The Ten Commandments ?

 

[Lee1]

From the Wikipedia entry
The mount was covered by the cloud for six days, and on the seventh day Moses went into the midst of the cloud and was “in the mount forty days and forty nights.”[46] And Moses said, “the LORD delivered unto me two tablets of stone written with the finger of God; and on them was written according to all the words, which the LORD spake with you in the mount out of the midst of the fire in the day of the assembly.”[47] Before the full forty days expired, the children of Israel collectively decided that something had happened to Moses, and compelled Aaron to fashion a golden calf, and he “built an altar before it”[48] and the people “worshipped” the calf.[49]

Moses Breaking the Tablets of the Law (1659) by Rembrandt

After the full forty days, Moses and Joshua came down from the mountain with the tablets of stone: “And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses’ anger waxed hot, and he cast the tablets out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount.”[50] After the events in chapters 32 and 33, the LORD told Moses, “Hew thee two tablets of stone like unto the first: and I will write upon these tablets the words that were in the first tablets, which thou brakest.”[51]“And he wrote on the tablets, according to the first writing, the ten commandments, which the LORD spake unto you in the mount out of the midst of the fire in the day of the assembly: and the LORD gave them unto me.”[52]

According to Jewish tradition, Exodus 20:1–17 constitutes God’s first recitation and inscription of the ten commandments on the two tablets,[53] which Moses broke in anger with his rebellious nation, and were later rewritten on replacement stones and placed in the ark of the covenant;[54] and Deuteronomy 5:4–25 consists of God’s re-telling of the Ten Commandments to the younger generation who were to enter the Promised Land. The passages in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 contain more than ten imperative statements, totalling 14 or 15 in all.

 

[IWantGod]

“The 10 commandments and the laws of the faith were just made up by the poor to gain influence.”

That’s a new one. My favourite one is the idea that religion was created by the rich and powerful to stop the poor and lesser classes from rebelling against their power. That to me is more believable.

There is such a thing as psychological warfare, and believe me we are at war. But the more you study and get involved in your faith, the more you realise that evil people are not sophisticated enough to develop such a degree of spiritual understanding without being deeply involved in the nature of what Christianity teaches.

 

[Jim-Eustachius]

Out of curiousity how’d you counter the “stopping the poor people rebelling” (heard that one quite a bit too) one?

Just reaffirming that they have the burden of proof?

-Kindest regards, James.

 

[IWantGod]

Just reaffirming that they have the burden of proof?

The truth is that religion, in history and even now, has been abused and used as a tool by those in power to subdue those with less. There’s no point in denying that. But their success is usually due to the ignorance of those they oppress. I think educating ones-self reveals that the right to rule always has a caveat and that the oppressed are not called to live in oppression unconditionally. I don’t think it’s reasonable to argue that these problems are a direct result of or intrinsic to Christian teaching. So to say that Christianity is a tool of oppression doesn’t quite add up and requires deception in order to convince.

And yes, as you say, the possibility of something being true is not proof of it being true. People are paranoid of being controlled. But moral laws are good if they full-fill the dignity of the people that such laws exist to defend, including the rich and powerful. So to me it’s a question of whether or not Christian teaching fulfils our moral dignity as human beings, and i believe, in it’s proper understanding, that it does, and certainly more so than any beliefs that have come before it and since.

So yes, the burden of proof lies with the one making the claim.

 

[poche]

The Law of God applies to everyone, the rich no less than the poor.

 

[Atreju]

Nietzsche was actually not antisemitic. In fact in his later post mental-breakdown years he thought he needed to kill the Pope because he thought the Pope was going to kill all the Jews.

 

[tafan2]

The truth is that religion, in history and even now, has been abused and used as a tool by those in power to subdue those with less. There’s no point in denying that.

Of course this has happened. But is that not beside the point. The question is was a given religion and its associated beliefs created with this intent. As to Catholicism, one would be very hard pressed to come up with a historical argument asserting this point. I believe the same would apply to Judaism.

 

[Gorgias]

Nietzsche was actually not antisemitic.

That’s a rather post-modern revisionist take on Nietzsche, I’d assert. Reading his writings, it’s difficult to make the claim that he had a positive outlook on Jewish religion, culture, or ethnicity.

The best analysis I recall reading about the question was a review of a book (which itself claimed Nietzsche wasn’t anti-semitic). The reviewer commented that Nietzsche might not have been considered an anti-Semite in the context of the time and place of his life, but his words are certainly considered anti-Semitic now.

In any case, the OP’s statement really is a restatement of Nietzsche’s commentary on the motivation behind the genesis of the Hebrew faith.